Nov 04, 2016

'Digital finance: full inclusion or empty promise?' - one of the great sessions on offer at European Microfinance Week 16-18 Nov. See Graham Wright's interview on Microfinance Gateway:

The European Microfinance Week has a special plenary on Digital Finance this month where you are participating as one of the key panelists. The title of the session raises an important question: “Digital finance: full inclusion or empty promise?” Can you tell us in what way is digital technology making finance more inclusive?

There has been much hype of the ability of digital financial services (DFS) to turbocharge financial inclusion. We all saw an opportunity to significantly reduce the costs of delivering a range of financial services, and an opportunity to finally make the business case for mass market deposit mobilization. After the initial, rapid success of M-PESA in Kenya, I think we collectively under-estimated the investments made, and the pilot-testing and rollout work done by Safaricom to ensure that M-PESA succeeded. Too few providers seem to have the vision or appetite to make these investments, and so for every one of GSMA’s “sprinters,” there are around eight to ten deployments limping along, inadequately funded and poorly implemented.

Read the full interview here

Source: Microfinance Gateway

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